Petter Reinholdtsen announced the release of Debian Edu Squeeze 6.0.3
beta2 [1]: download and installation instructions [2] are available on
the wiki, and in particular a useful [3] "Getting Started" chapter in
which you can find explanations of how to log in for the first time.
Feedback and installation reports can be sent to the Debian Edu mailing
list [4].

Debian Edu is a project aiming to make a Debian Pure Blend for
educational purposes, which can be used in schools and other educational
institutions. The Debian Edu project develops and maintains Skolelinux
[5], a complete and free "out of the box" software solution for schools.
For more information about Debian Edu, please visit therelated wiki page
[6].

Stefano Zacchiroli sent some bits from the DPL [7] in which he reported
about the work done by Martin Michlmayr as Auditor, in order to
reconstruct Debian's expenses and budgets. Stefano also sent a call for
help for Wheezy artwork organisation, and announced that Gunnar Wolf has
volunteered to monitor the discussion regarding the Creative Commons
process for revision 4.0 on behalf of Debian.

Forthcoming new release of the X server
---------------------------------------

Cyril Brulebois blogged about the forthcoming X server release 1.12 [8]:
one major change is the addition of XI2.2 patches, which are related to
multitouch support. Another significant change is the addition of
support for Intel's Sandy Bridge New Acceleration in the Debian
packages.

Enrico Zini announced a new interface for the Debtags website [18].
Debtags is a project to classify Debian packages by adding tags to them:
"Debtags attaches categories (we call them tags) to packages, creating a
new set of useful structured metadata that can be used to implement more
advanced ways of presenting, searching, maintaining and navigating the
package archive", Enrico saidwhile presenting the project in 2005 [19].
Using the new interface, it is possible to search packages [20], take a
look at statistics about Debtags [21] and, obviously, help with the
tagging effort [22]. For more information about Debtags, you can visit
the related wiki page [23].

Paul Wise reported that the transition from defoma to fontconfig is
finally complete [24]. Defoma is the Debian-specific font manager, long
unmaintained, while the replacement (fontconfig) is cross-distribution
and also has wide support from upstreams. In the past three years the
Debian Fonts Task Force [25] has worked a lot in order to gain this
result, thanks especially to the work of Christian Perrier and Paul
Wise. Please note that the transition is not completely smooth: "Xorg
does not yet support fontconfig so for now programs relying on
server-side fonts will only be able to use thexfonts- packages shipping
their fonts in the directories known by the X server" and in addition
"there are some issues [26] with Ghostscript and CJK", Paul said.

Since the last issue of the Debian Project News, two new issues of the
[27] "This week in Debian" podcast have been published: with Jonathan
Nadeau [28], about the Northeast GNU/Linux Fest; and with Raphael
Hertzog [29], about the Debian handbook.

Jonas Smedegaard reported that the Indonesian newspaper [35] "Serambi"
dedicated an article to his Debian involvement after his presence at a
radio talkshow in Aceh, Indonesia. Jonas was travelling Asia in order to
deliver a series of talks dedicated to Debian Pure Blends [36]. More
information about his trip are available on a related wiki page [37].

The web team is pleased to announce that all languages have finished
their migration to UTF-8 [38], so the Debian website [39] is now
available for everyone in UTF-8, thanks to all the translators who
worked on this issue.

Asheesh Laroia wrote an interesting article about short key IDs with
OpenPGP and GNU Privacy Guard [40], arguing that using them is
fundamentally insecure as it's easy to generate collisions for short key
IDs.

The Debian Project was mentioned in an article by Bruce Byfield on
Datamation titled [41] "2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments" .
According to the author, in fact, while various Open Source projects saw
a decline in 2011, the Debian project "spent much of 2011 reinventing
itself. In the past few twelve months, it has -- among other things --
tried to encourage cooperation among its derivatives, revamped its new
member process, and experimented with IRC training sessions."

Martin Zobel-Helas announced that he has applied the main theme of
Debian website to db.debian.org, the internal LDAP directory of Debian
Developers [42]. In the previous days, thanks to Cristoph Berg, the
Debian Quality Assurance website [43] had also switched to the main
theme.

You can find more information about Debian related events and talks on
the events section [48] of the Debian web site, or subscribe to one of
our events mailing lists for different regions: Europe [49], Netherlands
[50], Hispanic America [51], North America [52].

Do you want to organise a Debian booth or a Debian install party? Are
you aware of other upcoming Debian related events? Have you delivered a
Debian talk and want to link it on our talks page [53]? Send an email to
the Debian Events Team [54].

According to the Bugs Search interface of the Ultimate Debian Database
[56], the upcoming release, Debian 7.0 "Wheezy", is currently affected
by 797 release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or
on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 532 release-critical
bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.

In his last report on Debian Installer localisation [59], Christian
Perrier noted that eighteen languages are currently up to date for D-I's
core files; ten (Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Kazakh, Dutch,
Portuguese, Russian and Slovak) are 100% complete for the moment.

Christian informed us previously [60] that "A very important and
critical fix to partman-zfs broke a string in sublevel 4." That explains
why the results are lower than thelast time [61] we relayed the
translation status, but translators are quickly working to make the
Debian Installer completely available in many languages.

Please note that these are a selection of the more important security
advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about
security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please
subscribe to the security mailing list [83] (and the separate backports
list [84], and stable updates list [85] or volatile list [86], for
"Lenny", the oldstable distribution) for announcements.

Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer
writers to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on.
Please see the contributing page [100] to find out how to help. We're
looking forward to receiving your mail atdebian-publicity@lists.debian.org [101].